With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.
If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.
Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
That's not ordinary language, that's a bunch of court cases with goofy rules about precedents.
If you ask people to sort ethnic groups by how closely related they are to each other, I'm pretty sure it will match the genetic clustering.
The precedence defense is confusing considering how many of these cases contradict each other.
Your claim is that "white" is an objective category, not that people's perceptions of ethnic group closeness matches reality (which I find highly dubious to begin with, do you think people think of e.g. native Americans as related to Siberians?)
I'm not sure what you mean by "objective", I only said it's not socially constructed, but let's go with it, I guess. I don't know how you're separating the two. Once you sort groups by similarity, you can draw a rough boundry around them. You can call that category "white" or you can call it "blorgoschmorg" but it will consist mostly of the same people, especially if you ask the sorters to draw boundaries of the same size.
If you put them next to each other, quite possibly so. Especially relative to other groups.
The size of the boundary is exactly what makes it socially constructed.
If you get someone to put two groups close to each other, they'll think of them as close to each other? Is that the claim here?
Originally you said race doesn't cleave reality at the joints. Even if there's no objectively correct size of the category, it doesn't prove what you originally said. If there's a lot of joints, one person can cleave slightly to the left of how another would do it, and they'd both cleave at the joints.
In one case I meant "how related they are to each other" in the other I meant physically, so a person can take a look at each of them, and mark their similarities and differences. As opposed to just name-dropping "Native American" and "Siberian" to a person who has never seen either, and is only aware of the geographical separation between America and Siberia.
This is an extremely pedantic point to make, but sure, I can agree that the metaphor I chose was perhaps not totally correct.
The broader point I made was that there isn't one correct way to define "white" (which you seem to agree with) and therefore who is white and who isn't is socially constructed.
This is before getting into cultures that conceive of race very differently from anglos, like the Latinos who invented about thirty races for different admixtures of black, white and native, or the Romans who (from what i can remember from my reading) did not have a notion of white/nonwhite and instead considered themselves quite different from the various peoples they conquered, even their next door neighbors the Etruscans, who did they not grant citizenship to until hundreds of years after the conquest.
Sorry about the pedantry, but I find it frustrating because to me the metaphor has a clear and useful meaning, it says the the way one drew the categories is fundamentally broken. In biology you can create categories like "mammal" and "reptile", and even though nature will throw a duck-billed platypus at you sometimes, these categories will still cleave reality at the joints. On the other hand, if you tried to draw a boundary in a way that includes half of all known mammals, and half of all known reptiles, that division would be broken, and wouldn't cleave reality at the joints.
The important thing to note is that even though there isn't one correct way to define any particular race, the core is usually the same, and people fight over the boundaries. This makes broad statements like "white is socially constructed" clearly false, as that implies the core of the concept is up for grabs.
They're just operating at a different level of granularity. It does nothing to disprove the point that race is not socially constructed.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link